Intangible. Untouchable. All things to some People. And a laughable concept to everyone else…

Discerning Readers

I suspect some of you might be tempted to go and do something else when you realise that the subject of this short piece is about the Daily Record’s discerning readers…

Wait! Come back! There’s a serious point to be made…

Last night, Keith Jackson took to Twitter to trail some apparent excitement in today’s Record.

Having quite a high threshold before we are genuinely impressed, a number of Clumpaneers raised a sceptical online eyebrow at the hype, and awaited sight of the actual story before getting carried away.

And we were right to do so, because it was old news. Literally. “Crisis”? What crisis?

Wherein Keith asks: “What sort of board would be so stupid as to sign a severance deal with their chief executive agreeing to cover his legal costs if he was ever accused of being a criminal?”

…and we are provided with the transcript of a ‘lively’ 2013 conversation between then-RIFC Chairman Malcolm Murray and Imran Ahmad. This conversation – as the Record freely admits – was previously leaked and featured in The S*n ‘newspaper’ some time ago.

For obvious reasons, I am not going to comment on the whys and wherefores of the issues raised by either the conversion, or the people involved.

However, I am going to comment on the reaction of many people who read the piece in today’s Record.

Rather than ‘marvel’ at the content of the piece, many people simply went into questioning mode:

Why was the Record running a story about this old recording?

Why now?

And whose (if anyone’s) purposes did it serve?

It is widely believed that large parts of the MSM failed to investigate and address the issues that led ultimately Rangers’ demise. It is also felt by many that much of the MSM has subsequently pandered to Rangers’ calamitous tribute act in a pretty unquestioning way.

A glorious consequence of this is that many consumers of the Scottish sports media simply won’t accept its output at face value any longer.

Some might label this scepticism as ‘paranoia’ or ‘obsession’ with imagined ‘agendas’, and it has to be acknowledged that some people take things too far by venturing into outright hostility.

But the simple fact is that many of us are in no mood to accept handed-down narratives, and will ask searching questions whenever anyone tries to instruct us on any aspect of our game.

If we weren’t prepared to do this we might still be cowering in a cellar fearing ‘Armageddon’, and wondering which of our clubs would have gone to the wall by the time we dared to come out…